This qualitative, 8-month study analyzed first-grade children's playful responses to literature in the classroom context. The broad purpose of this research was to investigate the ways that children construct meaning as they respond to literature through play as a form of reader response. The findings presented in this paper highlight the ways the…

Classroom physical environment has been widely researched over the past few decades. In this respect, more recent attention has focused on the provision of structural and symbolic features; however, no study has been conducted to compare the structural and symbolic features of classroom physical environment in English as a foreign language (EFL)…

This study examined whether defending and passive bystanding during peer victimization episodes were associated with individual- and classroom-level efficacy to stop peer victimization. Self-report survey data were analyzed from 1,467 Swedish fourth-grade students (mean age = 10.55) from 100 classrooms in 63 schools. Multilevel analyses revealed…

Poetry is a key element of many literature curricula but poetry teaching is something with which many teachers struggle. Research indicates that teachers lack experience of poetry as well as subject knowledge and that current high-stakes testing poses challenges. While previous research has investigated teachers' experiences through large…

As strategies for co-creation in teaching and learning, the democratic classroom and students-as-partners pedagogies seek to empower students by equally distributing the responsibilities of decision-making across the students and instructors in a class. In this essay, we describe and analyze how students in a second-year interdisciplinary seminar…

Many studies have been conducted to identify the factors explaining individual differences in children's emotion understanding (capacity to comprehend the nature, causes and consequences of emotions in the self and others). These studies represent a significant advance in our comprehension of the origins of the child's capacity to understand…

The purpose of this study was to implement a student response system-Kahoot to find out whether the inclusion of Kahoot in the teaching-learning process affected pre-service teachers' perceptions of the classroom environment in a compulsory Educational Sciences course. This study employed an experimental research design and the participants of the…

Kindergarteners' creative dispositions are not only affected by their individual characteristics, but also by the organizational creative climate of their kindergartens. Using the Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM), this study examined a correlation between a 5-year-old child's variables (e.g. child's creativity and their perceptions of creative…

In this expository piece based on my Haimo teaching award presentation, I share three guidelines that drive my teaching: be informed, be courageous, and have compassion. Becoming an informed mathematics educator requires knowledge about evidence-based teaching practices, which can be acquired via mathematics education research and policy…

The fear of making mistakes and avoidance of risks can create disabling anxiety and limit learning opportunities. However, it is possible to teach mathematics in ways that not only reduce student agency but also have the effect of excluding some students. This article proposes approaches that are intended to both foster student decision making and…

Background: Internalizing problems have increased among Swedish adolescents. We examined whether classroom disorder was associated with internalizing problems and whether it explained the trends in internalizing problems. Furthermore, we examined whether school contextual factors were associated with internalizing problems and whether they…

One popular observational instrument to evaluate teaching is the Classroom Assessment Scoring System--Secondary (CLASS-S). Yet, the secondary version of the CLASS poorly discriminates classroom management quality beyond identifying extremely chaotic classrooms with teachers' scores clustering in the most positive ranges of effectiveness. Studies…

This article presents an evaluation of an active learning classroom (ALC) initiative at the University of Ottawa. Preliminary results indicate three broad trends to inform future practice and classroom design: 1) Despite advances in educational technology, there remains a strong appetite for low-tech, interactive learning opportunities; 2)…

Previous research provides evidence that ratings from students and external observers can deliver reliable and valid measures of teaching quality. However, there is still a lack of research on how stable these measures are across time and classes, which is particularly important when they are used for evaluations. We addressed this issue in 3…

This study aimed to describe the quality of interactions between early childhood educators (ECEs) and children, as observed in childcare centers and as reported by early childhood educators (N = 15) working with 5 year-old children. To assess ECEs' practices related to the quality of these interactions as observed in childcare centers…